The introduction of the microprocessor in the late 1970's and early 1980's made it possible for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques to be used in a wide range of applications. However, general-purpose microprocessors such as the Intel x86 family were not ideally suited to the numerically-intensive requirements of DSP, and during the 1980's the increasing importance of DSP led several major electronics manufacturers (such as Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and Motorola) to develop DSP chips—specialized microprocessors with architectures designed specifically for the types of operations required in DSP. Like a general-purpose microprocessor, a DSP chip is a programmable device, with its own native instruction set. DSP chips are capable of carrying out millions or more of arithmetic operations per second, and like their better-known general-purpose cousins, faster and more powerful versions are continually being introduced.
Traditionally, the DSP chip included a single DSP microprocessor. This single processor solution is becoming inadequate, because of the increasing demand for more arithmetic operations per second in, for example, the 3G base station arena. The major problem is that the massive number of arithmetic operations required are concurrent and must be done in real-time. The solution of adding more DSP microprocessors to run in parallel has the same disadvantage of the past unsuccessful solution of adding more general-purpose microprocessors to perform the DSP applications.
One solution to the increasing demand for more real-time, concurrent arithmetic operations, is to configure the programmable logic and interconnect in a Programmable Logic Device (PLD) with multiple DSP elements, where each element includes one or more multipliers coupled to one or more adders. The programmable interconnect and programmable logic, are sometimes referred to as the PLD fabric, and are typically programmed by loading a stream of configuration data into SRAM configuration memory cells that define how the programmable elements are configured.
While the multiple DSP elements configured in the programmable logic and programmable interconnect of the PLD allow for concurrent DSP operations, the bottleneck, then becomes the fabric of the PLD. Thus in order to further improve DSP operational performance, there is a need to replace the multiple DSP elements that are programmed in the PLD by application specific circuits.